Traditional terms for theology of work, including co-creation and vocation, tend to overvalue work, abetting the alienating conditions of postindustrial labor. To develop a theology that can help workers make sense of work's expansion, abstractness, and precarity, this essay proposes a postindustrial ethic of selective detachment from work. The Benedictine tradition offers a model. According to the Benedictine Rule, monastic work is important as a penitential practice but is strictly circumscribed, with prescriptions to forestall overinvestment in work. By detaching themselves from work, monastics cannot place labor ahead of prayer. In the medieval economy, monastic labor demonstrated work's role in sanctification. Today, the Benedictine Rule demonstrates the need for worldly ascetical practices that will limit work so it does not inhibit someone seeking holiness.

Three figures in the American Reformed tradition—the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the theocentric ethicist James Gustafson, and the biocentric poet Robinson Jeffers—treat the perception of beauty as the framework of moral discernment in ways that seem particularly significant for ecological ethics. Their work makes vividly concrete dimensions of Calvin's theology of creation that have been the subject of increasing theological attention over the past twenty-five years. By focusing on receptivity to natural beauty, their approach suggests a reorientation of the Christian ecological conversation that would root responsibility in grateful awe rather than stewardship, and would substitute graced responsiveness for obligation. This shift away from duty, sacrifice, and self-denial has the prophetic potential to inspire life-way changes that have been hard to effect through caustic critiques of wasteful materialism or exhortations to just regard for generations as yet unborn.

In Calvin's doctrine of sanctification and in recent work on children's moral formation within developmental psychology, we find a surprising convergence. In both cases, moral formation or transformation takes place within the context of a parent's (divine or human) loving and unconditional commitment to a child. Although Reformed doctrines of sanctification have struggled to articulate how the graced change of sanctification is intelligible as a human process, a comparison between these two approaches shows that sanctification is both intelligible to the moral agent and a genuinely human process. This comparison also highlights affective social acceptance as a condition for moral agency that is infrequently addressed in theoretical accounts of moral formation.

While he was archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, the scholar and theologian Rowan Williams faced divisive controversy over ethical issues such as human sexuality, women's ordination, and the treatment of religious minorities. This essay presents a selective retrieval of Williams's approach to communal disagreement as an important contribution of the Anglican tradition to the future of Christian ethics. Williams's concept of ethical discernment as an exercise in "recognition" offers a way for communities to approach differences as fostering constructive engagement and expanding ethical insight. Kathryn Tanner's analysis of culture and tradition in Theories of Culture is used to explicate the strengths and limitations of Williams's thought.

This essay reconstructs the medieval practice of evangelical poverty as a resource for contemporary political theology. Francis of Assisi and his predecessors committed themselves to a form of voluntary poverty that directly contested the distribution of social power in twelfth-century Europe. Evangelical poverty was for them a critical and liberating practice. Yet they disagreed about how this practice was related to standing norms of ecclesial authority. Francis broke with the earlier movements by defining evangelical poverty as a posture of humility and obedience rather than as a counterclaim on apostolic authority. These movements are worth retrieving both for their shared commitment to a liberating poverty and for the questions they raise about the relationship between poverty and authority.

Detention, a pillar of the contemporary US immigration system, has detrimental effects on those who are incarcerated, their families, and their communities. Following a discussion of immigration detention and the ways in which faith-connected groups are responding, this essay draws on twenty in-depth interviews to explore the links between these ethical practices and the Christian mystical tradition. In particular, it brings the voices of activists responding to immigration detention into conversation with the three stages of the mystical journey articulated by Dorothee Soelle—being amazed, letting go, and resisting. The essay argues that mysticism and action for social justice are intimately interwoven, and it suggests that recognition of this could enrich Christian discussion and praxis surrounding immigration.

Aquinas's teachings on usury are difficult to apply directly to the modern economy given the tremendous transformations in economic institutions and sensibilities since his day. However, his treatment of the relationship between the abstraction of money and the problem of disordered concupiscent desire proves to be helpful in understanding modern financial instability. Money invites a disordered understanding of the infinite good that is the object of human desire, channeling that desire into the fruitless quest for indefinite accumulation, which is both destabilizing to the economic system and ultimately frustrates the pursuit of real goods. Aquinas's thought offers clarity about the proper role of economic goods in a life well lived that is necessary for thinking about the role finance should play in a humane economy.

This essay offers a constructive, ecological extension of Martin Luther King Jr.'s social ethics using a phrase from Henry David Thoreau's classic, Walden, that King often used: "improved means to an unimproved end." King argued that this Thoreauvian theme "summarized" modern life; in particular, he employed this idea to address the systemic, interconnected forces of racism, materialism, and militarism. This essay argues that King's work is fertile ground for the cultivation of an ecological ethic capable of resisting the logic of commodification of the West.

This essay presents an apology for theological humanism drawn from Christian sources as the most adequate ethical stance for respecting and enhancing the integrity of human and nonhuman life into the global future. After clarifying the meaning and task of an apology, the essay begins with the ethical challenge posed by global dynamics and then explores the endangerment to future life by the expansion of human power. In order to formulate an ethics in this fraught context, the essay then explores the relation between the discourses of identity and responsibility as two dominant patterns of thought in current ethics and argues that claims about "identity" must be situated within an ethics of responsibility. The apology concludes by uncovering the ethical meaning of theological humanism in terms of Christian affirmation of being fully alive in love through Christ and before God.

Police and protesters clashed in the aftermath of fatal police violence against unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Commentators on all sides of the public discourse about these events invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to ground their opinions of the violent encounters as well as the public protests and protest movements that ensued in response. I explore the competing invocations, reflecting on what about King captures the American public imagination, what gets omitted, and what is at stake in the debate. Finally, I examine how King's theological ethics can both inform the means of public protest and address the abuses of American state power.